Over the last few years we’ve got rid of allllmost all our single-use plastic (we’re still coming for you, cable ties) and managed to halve our festival fuel consumption. Each year we measure our impact against the high standards set by the good people at A Greener Festival, and what we learn then feeds into improvements for the next festival.
Want to learn more about what we’re doing this year and how you can help us? Read on…
We’re excited to share with you all the good stuff we’re doing to make the festival as sustainable as it can be. We take our responsibility to be as sustainable as we can extremely seriously.
The future is all about refilling and re-using, so from 2020 we’ll have two prices for hot drinks in our café: the price for the drink and then an additional charge if you need a disposable cup. There will be a handy cup wash station next to the Tank café to make using your own cup nice and easy too.
A water bottle and re-useable coffee cup are essential kit for Greenbelt, so make sure you bring yours. We are single-use plastic bottle free, but there are lots of free drinking water refill stations.
Pay a £2 deposit for your Green Cup when you buy your first drink in the Jesus Arms or Blue Nun. Then you can use that same cup all weekend for refills, or swap it for a clean one with your next drink. Whichever you decide, when you give back your cup you’ll get your £2 deposit back.
If you’re driving to Greenbelt, or looking for a lift, you can use Liftshare. Who knows who you’ll meet along the way, what kind of connections will be sparked and how much carbon you could save.
One of our guiding principles each summer is to tread a little more softly than we did the year before. You can read last year’s sustainability impact report here for a flavour of what we’re doing and how we’re measuring it. In it, you’ll see that we generated 348 tonnes of CO2 last year. And a whopping 98% of that carbon was generated by car travel to and from the festival.
Having begun to measure and report on our carbon footprint, the next step is to try and reduce it as much as possible. That’s why this summer sees the introduction of the Greenerbelter wristband – our scheme to celebrate and reward those festivalgoers who come to Greenbelt using public transport or pedal-power, and so help us to reduce carbon emissions.
This summer, if you travel to the festival on public transport, we’ll pick you up on our free shuttle bus from Kettering and we’ll give you a Greenerbelter wristband and some money-off vouchers on the bus. You’ll be able to use your vouchers to get a discounted drink, a discounted meal and a discounted copy of the festival guide onsite. The same goes for those of you who cycle to the festival.
It’s a little thank you from us to you for going greener and helping us tread lighter.
Whatever method you travel by, you can opt-in to offset your journey’s carbon emissions through our box office. Read more about that below.
Balancing the carbon emissions your Greenbelt pilgrimage generates has never been more important. In 2023 a whopping 98% of our festival carbon emissions came from travel to and from the festival. You can opt-in to offset your travel through our Box Office when you buy your tickets. Here’s how it works. Use this calculator to work out your emissions. Then, while adding your festival extras to your cart, look for the ‘Offset your journey’ option and simply pick the amount you’d like to donate: £3, £5 or £10.
Your donations get collected by ecolibrium who invest them in climate projects. In 2023 donations went to Energy Garden who work with local communities to generate renewable energy and improve green transport infrastructure and air quality, supporting biodiversity and empowering communities and young people to take climate action.
We have a list of plastics still to replace and we’re working on it. We’ve already achieved a lot. Last year we even replaced the plastic in our wristbands with compostable, beautiful ones made from bamboo.
There’s no plastic in any of the food and drinks packaging or cutlery provided by our caterers, and our bars have re-useable cups. Plastic bottles are gone, and we have eco-glitter to bring the sparkle, made from cellulose.
Where once we used plastic tape to mark out areas of the site, now we use coloured ropes. Signs that were single-use are now made of metal and designed to last. Tea bags, that quintessentially English thing, come from Clipper and Tea Pigs and are plastic-free.
At Greenbelt our vision is to recycle 100% of all our waste. We’re not there yet but we’re on the way. All the cups, plates, containers and cutlery onsite are compostable — so you can put them, and any uneaten food or drinks, straight into our new food waste bins.
All the recycling bins are clearly labelled with what they’re for. Make sure you put your waste in the correct bins. Please sort your campsite waste, too (using bags from the utility points).
There are large pens throughout the campsite for you to leave rubbish and recycling. You can also get colour coded bags to sort your own recycling and waste. We’re also giving everyone food waste bags in 2020 for you to use and return before you leave.
We even use recycled tents. Our main pre-erected tent contractor is Camplight, who reclaim and recondition the best tents left behind by festival goers and then give them another life by renting them out again.
Waste not want not. Rather than taking home tins of beans you haven’t used, why not donate your spare long-life food to the nearby Kettering food bank? You can drop donations at the Village Hall on Monday morning and we’ll donate them to the local Kettering foodbank on your behalf. In 2022 Greenbelters donated over 1 tonne of food. Nice one.
Please leave the site as you find it. Take all your rubbish and belongings with you. We’re proud of how pristine Greenbelters leave the site (the owners of Boughton love it too). We think we might be the tidiest festival on the planet. Please help us keep it that way.
We’re delighted to have received the Highly Commended Award again from A Greener Festival in 2023. In addition to our Community Action Award at the International AGF Awards 2020, and our Commended award from A Greener Festival in 2022. Our hard work is paying off but there’s still plenty to do though, and that’s why we’re proud supporters of Festival Vision 2025.
In 2016 we signed the Festival Vision 2025 pledge to cut our carbon footprint in half by the middle of this decade. We also pledged to reduce our diesel consumption by 50% and achieve recycling rates of over 50%. We hit the diesel reduction target in 2019, and supercharging our recycling rate is our next big focus.
